Poachers

A true story.

***
Come, my children!
Climb the trees!
Danger is here,
But haven lies with me.

Run to the nest,
My precious ones
Think not, for now,
Of the cruel men with guns.

See now, loves,
Didn't I say?
We would make it back home
To live one more day.

Silence, darlings,
Silence is key
Else a bullet may find you
And take you from me.

No tears, little one
For tears do make noise
to bring the men on us
And make quick their ploys.

Rest now your hearts
The danger is past
The men have gone by us;
Their patience can't last.

Stay safe, little lights,
Whilst I search through the rain
For signs of our hunters...
...though my search is in vain.

As soon as it can,
My heart will come back,
But until that time comes,
Know that it--

BANG.

I only know the basics of poetry. I'm no expert, but I really, really liked this. The end was my favorite part. It worked perfectly with your theme (which I thought was pretty original ,by the way) and was an unexpected surprise. I have but one complaint and it's a grammar issue:

Rest now your hearts
The danger is past
The men have gone by us;
Their patience can't lasts

"Lasts" should be last.

And I'm sure you already know that So, I'm not very helpful at all, am I?

Rhyme On!
~Lette

Thanks for the compliments! I noticed that typo before and went to change it, but I guess I forgot.

I kind of expected that ending, actually.

My main comment would be the narrator... I don't know who the narrator is. It sounds like it is an encompassing nature sort of thing, but then I can't really suspend my disbelief to think that nature would do this. Nature is mean. Also, it makes your ending like a little bit weaker. Right now, it's a little ambiguous as to who is getting shot... your narrator or your addressee. And that's fine! But nature can't be shot, so it's not as ambiguous.

And I loffs you too.

Waaasssaaaaap?!

Considering you abused me in my WRRF thread, I decided to come and review this. I suck at poetry reviews, but I'll give this a go. 'Cause I'm so awesome and nice. So yeah...

As soon as it can,
My heart will come back,
But until that time comes,
Know that it--

BANG.

Haha... gutted!

As a whole, I couldn't find any grammatical nit-picks, so I didn't comment on any... obviously. Besides, I'm terrible at finding grammatical errors, especially when it comes to poetry. For that reason, I'll just get onto my overall opinion on this. There is actually something grammatical I'd like to comment on though.

You're one of those people who think they're cool because they start every line in a poem with a capital letter. Now this is more of a matter of opinion kind of thing, but not every line needs to start with a capital letter. Unless there is a period before it, you don't necessarily have to include a capital letter at the beginning of the line. Considering I know practically nothing about poetry, I can't confidently tell you if capitalizing the first word of every line is grammatically incorrect. I do have a feeling though that it isn't technically necessary. Personally, I think it looks better capitalized, but I'm not sure whether it's right or wrong.

To be honest, I don't have an awful much to critique about this. I really enjoyed reading it and I loved how it ended, it shows how much of a loving person you are. The idea of the poem itself was great and, in my opinion, very original. You don't see many poem about poaching, after all. Well, I don't anyway. Your grammar was also impressive and so was your spelling. This poem actually makes you somewhat cool. There's still a long way to go though. One of the things that I liked best about this was that I thought it was rather quirky. It wasn't a classic poem about feelings, love and junk. It was about an interesting and original subject, and I love originality! Although I genuinely did enjoy reading this, there was one or two things that I think you could have done better on.

My first critique is actually what Snoink said. Right now, I am slightly confused to who the narrator is exactly. The title of this poem immediately got me thinking that it's something to with with nature. Then, after reading the poem itself, I assumed that the narrator was a bird of some kind. You did mention something about sending children into a nest and I don't know many people with nests in their homes. I'm still thinking that your narrator is a bird, it would make sense. What I'm confused by is the fact that I'm not sure who gets shot. It's obviously not the poachers, unless they can't control their guns or something. With them ruled out, it must either be the narrator, who I assumed is the mother bird, or her children/child. I'm edging on the fact that it's the mother bird that gets shot, but I'm not 100% sure. The reason I think this is because I got the impression that the mother bird leaves her children at the end of the poem to look for the hunters or something. You haven't made that very clear though, so I'm not sure if it's true. Besides, it could still be signalling the deaths of the children/child, I guess. Yeah... I'm not sure. I thinik that you could clear that up a bit.

My only other negative comment is the fact that I don't think there's enough imagery in this. Before you start ranting about this not being a very imagery kind of based poem anyway, I think that some imagery would be effective here. After reading this, and the ending, I'm assuming that you're going for a bit of an irony theme. The mother bird is trying to keep her and her children safe, but someone ends up getting shot anyway. I think that this could be funnier if you did in fact include some imagery. I think this because it would be rather funny if the narrator is rambling on about the beauty of the trees and how nature will keep them protected, or whatever, then someone suddenly gets shot. It would be pretty ironic and I think that it would make the piece even funnier. Plus, I always do like a bit of imagery in a poem, even if it's one like this. You have used some mild imagery, but I would like to see some more of it. This is more of a matter of opinion thing though really.

Okay... I'm rambling on. That's it, I think... I don't have anything else to say! There's nothing horribly wrong with this piece that makes me want to run into a lamppost with a chicken on my head, so that's a good sign. All that you need to do is to take into consideration what us reviewers have said an maybe edit this up a bit. You're a good writer, Timmy, and I know that you can make this piece even better than it already is. You just need to polish it.

Keep writing,

xoxo Rhian

P.S Paramore are better than Flyleaf.

Sheesh, Skins. For someone who apparently sucks at poetry reviews, that was awesome! Thanks to both you and Snoink for your helpfulness. For the record, I always pictured the mama as being an orangutan or a gorilla. Gorillas make nests.

And Paramore are a dirty trash can full of poop compared to Flyleaf. Just sayin'.